Buffet style restaurant facilities and cafeterias commonly contain food in temperature controlled serving containers. Some facilities contain several food service containers, each container being adapted to maintain a certain food product within a certain temperature range for several hours at a time. If food is not maintained within a predetermined temperature range then food can lose its flavor. More importantly, food spoilage can ensue if food which should be kept at cool temperatures becomes too warm or if food which should be kept at warmer temperatures becomes too cool.
Because of the number of injuries which could result from food spoilage, large scale food serving facilities expend a vast amount of resources in assuring that food temperature is maintained properly.
Many large scale food service facilities employ inspectors who record food temperature using a specially designed portable data collection device adapted to collect temperature data from served food. In use of such devices, an inspector places the device in contact with a served food product to record food temperature. One portable data collection device is used to collect data from each of several food product containers. Records over time for various serving or storage containers are kept manually, or, in more sophisticated devices are uploaded from a data collection device at intervals determined by the inspector, to a central processing facility.
Monitoring methods involving use of a portable data collection device are time consuming and require an excessive amount of human labor to be effective. Since these methods require human labor they are also susceptible to failure resulting from human error in the data collection process.
While human error and labor costs always limit the reliability and cost effectiveness of monitoring methods that require human labor, such as those methods involving use of a portable data collection devices, methods in which data is uploaded into computer storage devices are the susceptible to another type of problem. Food monitoring systems in which data is stored in host computers have been observed to be susceptible to tampering schemes which would allow an unscrupulous data collection worker to alter data recorded in a computer memory to cover up a system operations problem in the event an operations problem is observed.
There is a need for a food monitoring system which accurately monitors the temperature of stored or served food without requiring substantial human labor for effective operation, and which is substantially impervious to data tampering.